Cisco ASA vs. Sophos XG

Cisco ASA is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 75 reviews vs Sophos XG which is ranked 11th in Firewalls with 8 reviews. The top reviewer of Cisco ASA writes "Syslog generation and forwarding are good but it lacks many UTM features". The top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Gives us customizable policies, modifiable templates, and customized rules for single users". Cisco ASA is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks WildFire and Juniper SRX. Sophos XG is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos UTM and pfSense. See our Cisco ASA vs. Sophos XG report.

Quotes From Members Comparing Cisco ASA vs. Sophos XG

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

It protects our network.The stability of the product is good.Cisco ASA is very strong.It is a secure product.It is scalable and stable.At this point, we find that this product has high productivity and high availability and there is no need for improvement.It is a highly stable product. We rarely receive any serious outdates, so it works quite well.The IPS (In-plane switching) is the most valuable feature.

It has a very friendly interface like the Cyberoam iNG units, it has customizable policies, it has proper templates that you can even modify, and you can customize the rules, down to each single user.The dashboard is customizable as well. It gives you the feature of including what you need to see as soon as you open the dashboard and to remove the non-necessary stuff, which varies from one organization to the next and from one IT manager to the next. And it has a wide variety of reports as well, template and customizable reports.Valuable features include: the ease of setting up the VPN connection; the fact they have the cloud management option, so I can manage the firewall on a cloud platform from anywhere I am; the user interface is very user-friendly, so it's very easy for the administrator to make any policy changes.The most valuable feature, according to the setup we have at our work place here, is the flexibility of the system or the firmware that's running the appliance. It's so flexible, performing multiple rules with different configurations. According to the set up here, we need to implement several firewalls with different access levels, because we have a variety of users. For this requirement, it's very flexible and very easy to use.My clients gain efficiency in protecting against attacks from malware such as ransomware and hacker attacks. It also provides them efficient internet access control, and full visibility of ports, applications, and websites.Excellent product, meets most of the security needs of companies of various sizes. You can buy it without fear.

The pricing is a bit high.Migration with other appliances is not easy. It has to be done manually, and this takes a long time.It is not easy to configure.The scalability is a bit limiting, to be honest. In terms of when you look to changing landscape in terms of threats, I think to me, my personal it's a bit limiting.Tech support could not answer all of our questions. I had to do research on the web to solve my issues.<p>If there is old hardware, or appliances, it does not necessarily work with the new Cisco generation firewalls.At times the product is sluggish and slowMore intuitive support for SIP services are needed. This took a long time to configure properly for the user.

Let's say I set up a rule to block users from accessing YouTube or Facebook. The rule will only block the HTTP traffic, which is non-secure traffic... The problem comes when you are trying to block, or allow, similar traffic that uses HTTPS. You have to create a certificate and import it into the users' web browsers, whatever they are using... The problem occurs when you're dealing with roaming users who use laptops and have to move between different sites that have different types of policies applied to them. You have to import all sorts of certificates from each site into their browser. Doing so will most probably conflict with something else that is totally irrelevant and cause a problem.Since Sophos took over Cyberoam, the online technical library and support library have become super messy. To get a piece of information is becoming a nightmare. They need to reorganize the online technical support and technical library.I would like the update process to be easier, to update the firmware of the boxes. I think it's much better automatically than having to do it manually: Download the file, do network discovery. I they can make the update process much more automatic that would help.It is performing well. However, the only challenges that we are facing are the effectiveness with blocking the proxy and tuneling applications, aside from proxy and similar applications. So the application filter on the product is not really performing 100%. Every now and then there are some updates that are happening on such applications, and it takes time until it gets the appropriate updates and becomes capable of capturing such applications and blocking them.
A new feature I would really like to see would be some sort of an enhanced application filter with greater efficiency when it comes to the applications that can bypass firewall policies. These applications are really a nightmare. Once they are on the network and not detected, or the appliance is not really successful in capturing them and unblocking them, the bandwidth gets wasted all the time.Scalability it is a bit limited. We did a sizing exercise before the purchase. But that was just to fit our current needs. There was no room for having an option to upgrade the device. The only option that we have if we are grow in the near future, is to go for another model with higher specs, which is actually more expensive. In other words it doesn't have that modularity .It could offer a DNS Filter for blocking botnet networks.

The cost is a bit high compared to other solutions in the market.Cisco recently has become very expensive.The cost is a bit higher than other competitive solutions on the market.It is considered on the "high end" of the spectrum.The cost of keeping the licensing up on the ASA is very expensive. It has a lot of positives, but the cost of going with it is really starting to be a major negative right now.Commercial leasing is the best option.ASA pricing seems high compared to other firewalls, such as the Sophos XG models.The licensing features are getting more complicated. These should be simplified.

Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) is Cisco's end-to-end software solution and core operating system that powers the Cisco ASA product series. This software solution provides enterprise-level firewall capabilities for all types of ASA products, including blades, standalone appliances and virtual devices. Adaptive Security Appliance provides protection to organizations of all sizes, and allows end-users to access information securely anywhere, at any time, and through any device.

Adaptive Security Appliance is also fully compatible with other key security technologies, and so provides organizations with an all-encompassing security solution.

Sophos XG Firewall is next gen firewall that is optimized for today’s business, delivering all the protection and insights you need in a single, powerful appliance that’s easy to manage.

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